Like
the Passover story, the celebration of Hanukkah reminds us that people can
overcome great obstacles and achieve great things if they have a vision of a
better society and build movements that challenge the conventional ideas of
their day.

Election
results and public opinion polls reveal that among white Americans, Jews have
consistently been the most liberal and progressive ethnic and religious
group. In 1920, when only 3 percent of Americans voted for Eugene Debs,
the Socialist Party candidate for president, Jews gave him 38 percent of their
votes. In 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover for president
with 57 percent of the popular vote, 82 percent of Jews supported FDR. In 1960,
John F. Kennedy squeaked out a victory over Richard Nixon, getting barely more
than 50 percent of all votes, but among Jews, it was no contest, with JFK
garnering 82 percent of their votes. In 2008, Barack Obama bested John McCain
by a 53-46 margin, but he won the Jewish vote 78-22.

Despite the prominence of a small number of Jews in the Trump administration – including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and policy aide and alter-ego Stephen Miller – few Jews are conservatives or Republicans. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote against Donald Trump by 48 to 46 percent, but Jews favored Clinton by 71 to 23 percent. In the 2018 midterm elections that swept in a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, Jews led the “blue wave,” giving Democrats 79 percent of their votes.

A 2012
survey found that 81 percent of Jews, compared with only 48
percent of all Americans, favored same-sex marriage should be legal. In the
same survey, 93 percent of Jews believed that abortion should be legal in
contrast to 53 percent of all Americans.

More
than most other demographic groups – and particularly white Americans –
Jews overwhelmingly
disapprove of President Donald Trump’s handling of most policy
issues, including family separations at the Mexican border (78 percent), treatment of DACA recipients (74 percent),
guns (74 percent), the Mueller Report
(73 percent), building the border wall
(71 percent), taxes (70 percent), Supreme Court nominations (69 percent),
health care (69 percent), and banning immigration from certain Muslim-majority
countries (66 percent). Seventy-one percent of Jews disapprove of Trump’s
handling of the upsurge of anti-Semitism in America, a trend that the President
himself has provoked by consistently
expressing anti-Semitic stereotypes and encouraging the rise of white
nationalist hate groups.

Voting
is the most basic of political activities, but social change happens only when
people participate in activist movements that influence how people think and
vote. Throughout American history, Jews have played and continue to play a
disproportionately large role in the key social justice movements – as
organizers and activists, politicians and jurists, and thinkers, artists,
journalists, playwrights, poets, and novelists.

In
1900, anyone who advocated for women’s suffrage, laws protecting the
environment and consumers, an end to lynching, the rights of workers, a
progressive income tax, or old-age insurance was considered a dangerous dreamer
or a dangerous radical. Today such ideas are taken for granted. The radical
ideas of one generation have become the common sense of the next.

Jews
were among leaders and rank-and-file activists in all the great movements of
the past century — labor, civil rights and civil liberties, feminism,
environmentalism, gay rights and the crusade against militarism – that have
made America a more humane, democratic and inclusive country.

Consider
Rose Schneiderman, a fiery socialist union organizer. She was on the front
lines of the Progressive Era battles against slums and sweatshops. So were
settlement house pioneer Lillian Wald, Rabbi Stephen Wise and lawyer Louis
Brandeis (later a Supreme Court justice), whose writings and legal activism
helped tame the growing power of corporate monopolies. Victor Berger, an
Austrian immigrant and in 1910 the country’s first Socialist congressman,
introduced the first bill to provide old-age pensions. Eventually, the idea was
adopted in 1935 when President Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security.

Jewish
social activism helped spearhead the early civil rights movement as well. In
1909, Joel Spingarn was a founder and then long-term president of the NAACP.
Julius Rosenwald of Sears & Roebuck was a pioneer in the new field of progressive
philanthropy. He endowed Jane Addams’ Hull House and Booker T. Washington’s
Tuskegee Institute, funded more than 5,000 schools for African Americans in the
rural South, and supported the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee-based
training center for labor and civil rights activists.

During
the Great Depression of the 1930s, labor leaders Sidney Hillman, David
Dubinsky, Rose Pesotta, and Ralph Helstein led battles for workers’ rights and
economic reform, while composers Yip Harburg (“Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”
and “Over the Rainbow”) and Aaron Copland (“Fanfare for the Common
Man”), artist Ben Shahn and playwright Clifford Odets (“Waiting for Lefty”)
gave shape to radical ideas that caught the public’s imagination.

During
the 1960s, Allard Lowenstein, along with African-American organizer Bob Moses,
created the Freedom Summer project, which brought more than 1,000 college
students to the South to register black voters. About half of the white
volunteers were Jews. Many of them — including Barney Frank, Heather Booth and
Vivian Rothstein — pursued careers in activism and reform that have lasted into
the 21st century. Two of them – Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – died at
the hands of extremist segregationists.

Lowenstein,
along with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, journalist I.F. Stone, critic Noam
Chomsky and other Jews, gave voice to the rising tide of anti-Vietnam War
sentiment. Jews constituted at least one-third of the early leaders of Students
for a Democratic Society, the leading campus anti-war organization.

Today,
when Jews represent less than two percent of the nation’s population, a new
generation of Jewish progressives is extending this activist tradition. The
individuals listed below are deeply rooted in today’s movements for social
justice. Some of them are directly involved in the Jewish community, but
most of them work for unions, community organizing and environmental groups,
and other issue advocacy organizations, or serve in public office as allies and
activists within government.

I
don’t pretend this is a comprehensive list. These are people I know, or
know about. They represent a wide spectrum of activism, but there are
tens of thousands of other Jews who could be included on others’ lists. These
are a few of my favorite Jews:

1. Nan Aron is founder
and president of the Alliance for Justice, which fights for federal court
appointees who respect civil rights and civil liberties

2. Ady Barkan, a veteran activist
and publicist for progressive causes, has become well-known as a fighter for
Medicare for All after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
(A.L.S.), a disease that slowly takes away nearly every physical function while
keeping the mind intact, and confined to a wheelchair. Politico called him
“the most powerful activist in America.”

3. Jeremy
Ben-Ami is president of J Street, the leading organization within
the American Jewish community committed to challenging Israel’s rightward
shift.

4. Medea Benjamin is
the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange and founder of the
women-led peace group Code Pink that uses create civil disobedience and humor
to challenge corporate and government decision-makers around issues of
militarism and the environmental crisis.

5. Rabbi Sharon Brous founded
IKAR, a progressive Los Angeles synagogue, in 2004, to attract unaffiliated
Jews alienated from the mainstream Jewish community. Brous and IKAR have helped
spark a revival of interest in Jewish spirituality, inter-faith ties, and
political activism.

6. Heather
Booth has been an organizer since the civil rights, anti-Vietnam
War and women’s movements of the 1960s. She created JANE, an underground
abortion service started before Roe, and founded the Midwest Academy, a
training center for social change leaders and organizers. She has been a key
strategist and activist in movements immigrant rights, voting rights, bank
reform, marriage equality, tax reform, and health care reform. She is the
subject of the recent documentary “Heather
Booth: Changing the World.”

7. Dan
Cantor was described in New
York magazine as the “model of a grassroots political
boss” for his role as Executive Director of the Working Families Party (WFP) of
New York, a progressive third party established in 1998. Under his leadership,
WFP led successful campaigns to reform New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws,
maintain access to affordable mass transit, and raise New York’s minimum wage.
The WFP has helped elect progressive mayors, state legislators, city council
members and members of Congress.

8. Alex
Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, led a major
transformation of the union into a more militant, inclusive, and effective
organization. Under his leadership, UTLA won major educational victories in
2019 following a week-long strike that catalyzed widespread support by building
bridges with community and faith-based groups, parents and students in the
country’s second-largest school system.

9. Donald Cohen, founder
of In The Public Interest, which works with unions, community groups, and local
governments to challenge privatization, develop progressive policy ideas, and
improve the effectiveness of progressive government

10. Stosh
Cotler is the CEO of Bend the Arc, a Jewish
social justice group, which has led the Jewish resistance to the Trump
administration.

11. Janice
Fine, spent more than 20 years as a community, labor, and electoral
organizer before joining Rutgers University’s labor studies faculty. She
is a co-convener of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, and works
closely with many national and local immigrant rights, labor, and community
organizing groups.

12. Lew
Finfer, a Boston-based community and tenants rights organizer since
1970, is currently executive director of the Massachusetts Communities Action
Network, a network of faith-based community organizations that has won
significant victories around economic, housing, and racial justice. He has led
successful campaigns around rent control, redlining, health care, paid family
leave and the minimum wage.

13. Jacob Frey served
on the Minneapolis City Council before being elected Mayor in 2017. A
college track star and a lawyer by training, Frey provided legal aid to tenants
who lost their homes after a tornado struck Minneapolis in 2011. The next year
he organized the first Big Gay Race, a 5K charity race to raise money for
Minnesotans United for All Families, a political group organizing for marriage
equality. On the City Council, he drafted the city’s minimum wage law and
paid sick leave ordinance, led an effort to require landlords to provide
tenants with voter registration information, and sponsored an ordinance
requiring polluters to pay fees based on the amount of pollution they produce
in order to fund green jobs. As mayor, he has dramatically increased city
funding for affordable housing and pushed for a comprehensive zoning reform plan
to allow three-family homes in the city’s residential neighborhoods, abolish
parking minimums for all new construction, and allow high-density buildings
along transit corridors, making Minneapolis the first major city to end
single-family zoning and confront the city’s segregation, high housing costs,
and sprawl.

14. Leah Fried, an organizer
with the United Electrical Workers union, along with local union
president Armando Robles led 240 workers to illegally occupy their
Chicago workplace in 2008 after their employer, Republic Windows and Doors,
abruptly told them that it was shutting down the factory, denying employees
severance and vacation pay they had earned. The workers formed and incorporated
New Era Windows, a worker-run cooperative, and raised the funds needed to buy
the machinery from their former employer and keep producing windows under the
new arrangement. It remains open for business.

15. Andrew Friedman is
co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a national network
of local and state community organizing groups with 53 affiliates in 34 states
that organize campaigns to advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and
economic justice policy agenda nationwide.

16. Marshall Ganz, the son
of a rabbi, joined the Southern civil rights movement before serving as the
organizing director for the United Farm Workers union. He teaches community
organizing at Harvard, serving as a guru for activists around the world. He was
the architect of Obama’s 2008 grassroots election campaign

17. Jackie
Goldberg’s activism started with the Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley
in 1964. After teaching in public schools, she won seats on the LA school
board, LA City Council, and California state legislature, serving as an
effective advocate for progressive causes, including spearheading battles for a
living wage and responsible development. After a decade hiatus in public
office, she was elected to the school board again in 2019.

18. Robert
Greenwald, an award-winning TV and movie director, founded the nonprofit
Brave New Films in 2000 to use documentary films to educate and mobilize for
progressive causes. Its films have tackled such topics as Fox News,
immigration, mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, Walmart, the
NRA, the Koch brothers, racism, and voter suppression.

19. Leah
Greenberg and Ezra Levin co-founded Indivisible soon
after Trump was elected president in 2016. Their on-line handbook for
progressives soon mushroomed into a nationwide movement of volunteer activists,
with over 6,000 chapters, devoted to mobilizing voters around progressive
issues and candidates.

20. Ilyse Hogue, CEO of
NARAL-Pro-Choice America, a leading women’s rights organization. She previously
worked at MoveOn.org, the Rainforest Action Network, and Media Matters for
America.

21. Eddie Iny is
the organizing director for OUR Walmart, a nationwide grassroots organization
of Walmart employees, which has successfully pushed the nation’s largest
private employer to raise based pay from $7.25 to $11 an hour, institute paid
family leave, and improve conditions for pregnant employees.

22. Rabbi Jill Jacobs,
executive director of T’ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, which raises
awareness and engages in direct action to protect human rights in the United
States and Israel.

23. Madeline
Janis, organizer and founder of the LA Alliance for a New Economy and
Jobs to Move America, has for over 35 years been on the inside and outside of
local and state government, working to create high road,
equitable economic development.

24. Cameron Kasky, a
survivor of the tragic shooting in 2018 at Marjory Douglas High School in
Parkland, Florida, is a founder of March for Our Lives and Never Again MSD,
organizations that advocate for stronger gun control.

26. Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum is
the spiritual leader of New York’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the largest
LGBTQ synagogue in the country. She joined CBST in 1992, at the height of
the AIDS crisis, and has become a powerful voice on social justice issues
within the Jewish and LGBTQ communities.

27. Larry
Krasner, a veteran radical defense attorney, won a surprise victory to
become Philadelphia’s District Attorney with a mission to end mass
incarceration and the criminal justice system’s racism.

28. Sheila Kuehl, a
former child actress (Zelda on “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”), co-founded
and served as managing attorney of the California Women’s Law Center. In 1997,
she became the first woman to be named Speaker pro Tempore of the California
State Assembly, just three years after becoming the state’s first openly gay
legislator. In the legislature, she sponsored successful bills to establish
paid family leave, protect victims of domestic violence, establish nurse to
patient ratios in hospitals, and prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis
of gender and disability and led the campaign for a statewide single-payer
health care system. She is currently one of five elected members of the
powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors which serves over 10 million
people, where she has fought to reduce homelessness and to establish LA
County’s first affordable housing trust.

29. Brad Lander spent
over a decade as a community organizer and neighborhood planner before being
elected to the NY City Council, where he co-founded its Progressive Caucus. He
has fought successfully to protect freelancers from wage theft, give fast-food
workers a fair workweek, and make sure Uber/Lyft drivers earn a living wage,
improve public transit, challenge the NYPD’s discriminatory practices, combat school
segregation, and expand affordable housing. Through #GetOrganizedBK, he
brought Brooklyn residents together to stand up to the Trump administration’s
bigotry, corruption, and injustice. He serves as chair of Local Progress, a
national network of over 800 progressive local elected officials in 45 states.

30. Stephen Lerner has
spent three decades unionizing hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, garment
workers, and other low-wage workers. He was the architect of SEIU’s Justice for
Janitors campaign, a nationwide campaign that led to dramatic improvements in
the wages and conditions of mostly immigrant service workers. He is currently
a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative and working
with unions and community organizing groups to expose and change the lax
regulations and unsustainable practices of private equity firms.

31. Rabbi
Joshua Levine-Graterserved congregations in the
greater New York and Los Angeles for 17 years before shifting gears and become
the executive director
of Friends in Deed, a local, religious-based non-profit addressing homelessness
and poverty in Pasadena. He serves on the board of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call
for Human Rights and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

32. Yonah
Lieberman, Emily
Mayer, and Simone
Zimmerman are founders of If Not Now, a movement to end the American
Jewish community’s support for Israel’s occupation of Arab territories,
including their criticism of Birthright tours of Israel for young American
Jews.

33. Ruth
Messinger is a former NY City Council member and Manhattan borough
president, who served as president of (and current ambassador for) the American
Jewish World Service, which has provided about $400 million to support
thousands of social justice organizations in the developing world to reduce
poverty, amplify the voices of poor and persecuted minorities, defend the land
and water rights of indigenous communities most affected by climate
change, and advance sexual health and rights for women, girls and LGBT
people.

34. Karen Nussbaum co-founded
9to5, an organization to address the concerns of women office workers in 1973.
That group inspired the 1980 film “9 to 5” starring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton
and Lilly Tomlin. She founded a vision of SEIU devoted to organizing office
workers and during the Clinton administration directed the Department of Labor’s
Women’s Bureau. In 2003 she co-founded and still directs Working America, the
community organizing arm of the AFL-CIO, dedicated to giving non-unionized
workers a voice in such issues as raising the minimum wage, paid family leave,
and health care reform.

35. Eli Pariser, was
executive director of MoveOn from 2004-2009 and has been a pioneer in figuring
out how technology can be utilized to promote progressive movements. He is
currently a fellow at New America.

37. Jane Ramsey, for
over three decades, led the Jewish
Council on Urban Affairs, leading struggles against poverty, racism and
anti-Semitism in partnership with Chicago’s diverse communities. She is now a
consultant to nonprofit advocacy groups and a member of the Illinois Coalition
for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

38.
Cong. Jamie Raskin served
in the Maryland state legislator before his 2016 election to Congress.
Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe called Raskin, who taught law at American
University for a quarter-century, “the best constitutional lawyer in all of
Congress.” In 2008 he started Democracy Summer, a program to teach
political activist skills to 16-to-22-year-olds. As a member of the Judiciary
Committee, he’s played an important role in the current impeachment fight.

39. Hillary Ronen was
an immigrant rights lawyer before being elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors,
where she’s been a strong advocate for tenants’ rights, public transit, and
environmental justice. She led the successful fight for a tax on big business
to fund affordable housing, a ballot measure approved by 60% of the
voters.

40.
Steve
Rosenthal has been described by the New York Times as one of the
Democratic Party’s “smartest and most influential strategists” and by
the Washington Post as, “one of the party’s best-known voter turnout
specialists.” He began his career in the labor movement as an
organizer with the Communication Workers of America, served as Associate Deputy
Secretary of Labor under Secretary Robert Reich in the Clinton administration,
founded America Coming Together (one of the largest voter mobilization
campaigns in Democratic Party history), and served as political director of the
AFL-CIO. He is currently president of The Organizing Group, which works with
unions and other progressive organizations to increase voter turnout.

41. Amy Rutkin, chief of
staff for Cong. Jerrold Nadler, has been a key behind-the-scenes architect of
the Democrats’ impeachment strategy.

42.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont)
has sparked a grassroots upsurge and changed the national debate with his two
presidential campaigns, putting democratic socialism on the political map.

43.
Cong. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois)
has been one of the most progressive members of Congress since she was elected
in 1998, after serving for eight years in the Illinois State Assembly. During
the previous 20 years, she was a community organizer, serving as program
director of Illinois Public action and director of the Illinois State Council
of Senior Citizens. In Congress, she has been deeply involved in the fight to
protect women’s reproductive freedom, supports a single-payer health care
system, opposed the Iraq war, and has been a leader on issues of consumer
safety, opposition to U.S. military, and LGBT equality.

44. Amy Schur, the
organizing director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment,
spearheaded the successful campaign for statewide rent control and just-cause
eviction law in 2019, and building the power of the tenants’ rights movement

45. Marilyn
Schneiderman, longtime union organizer, is currently director of the Center
for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University, which conducts
research and sponsors workshops to strengthen the influence of community
organizations, worker centers, and labor unions. She previously directed
the National AFL-CIO’s Department of Field Mobilization and served as executive
director of AVODAH, a national Jewish social justice organization.

46. Leah Simon-Weisberg has
been on the front lines of the housing crisis for over a decade. She is
the Directing Attorney of the Tenant Rights Program at Centro Legal de la Raza
in Oakland, working closely with community organizers to fight rent increases
and evictions. She’s worked with Tenants Together, the Alliance of Californians
for Community Empowerment, and other groups to challenge bank foreclosures and
predatory lending, drafted rent control and other laws for Bay Area cities, and
serves as an elected member of Berkeley’s Rent Board.

47. Daniel Sokatch is
CEO of the New Israel Fund, the largest funder of grassroots activist groups in
Israel that promote Arab-Jewish cooperation, human rights, LGBT rights, and
democratic change and oppose the Occupation and violation of Palestinian
rights.

48. Gloria
Steinem is a feminist icon and founder of MS magazine, the
Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the National Women’s Political Caucus.

49. Becky Wasserman is
the director of Government Relations for the Service Employees International
Union. She previously worked for J Street and the American Jewish World Service
and was President of the United States Student Association for two years.
She serves on the boards of Local Progress and the Center for Community
Change.

50. Randi Weingarten,
president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers since 2008,
has pushed to improve education standards, raise teachers’ salaries, and
challenge efforts to allow teachers to carry guns in schools.

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